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Blue Gems In Teeth Illuminate Women's Hidden Role In Medieval Manuscripts (abc.net.au)
brindafella writes: The jaw bone of a woman who died around 1000-1200 AD has specks of precious lapis lazuli (mineral) in the plaque of her teeth. This indicates that this woman would have licked the brush used in preparing precious illuminated manuscripts at the women's monastery in Dalheim in western Germany. The study by researchers from German-based Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and Britain's University of York showed that women, as well as men, were part of the production of the valuable manuscripts. "The researchers said this challenged long-held beliefs that women had played little role in the European Middle Ages in producing literary and written texts which came largely from religious institutions," reports the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. "Researcher Christina Warinner said this finding from the 11th century was unprecedented in showing more women were literate, educated and encouraged to read at that time."
how much can be extrapolated starting from a few blue flecks on an old tooth.
Indeed. The Chinese Room thought experiment shows why copying text verbatim says nothing about comprehension of said text. Similarly, a photocopier doesn't understand the words and images it makes copies of.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
I don't see why this implies literacy or even real education - many male monks were barely able to do more than copy what was in front of them and lots of priests in non-Italian countries could read out texts to their congregations without actually understanding Latin.
Manuscripts were produced in production lines - does someone assembling radiator grills for Ford know how to design a car?
Uhhh... no. The church regularly cracked down on education and what they called ‘feral latin’ among the clergy. Bishops and commissions of scholarly monks conducted regular visitations in parishes to judge and report the state of affairs. Plus, lapis lazuli was imported from Afghanistan and was at times more valuable than gold so this woman was an illustrator of some very high end texts. What is important about this discovery is more than anything else that it constitutes proof of the fact that women, presumably nuns, as well as monks were involved in the production of the most splendid manuscripts of the time because nobody except a first rate illustrator would have something as obscenely expensive as lapis lazuli in their dental plaque.
It's not "pure assumption". One of the reasons for the Carolingian Renaissance, for example, was the discovery by Charlemagne that his clergy knew shit (instead of knowing their shit).
Ezekiel 23:20
Speaking of Chinese and copying, I've seen (fake) western antiques produced in China by people who were obviously unfamiliar with the western alphabet, in that they copied shapes of letters in things like latin inscriptions without knowing what the letters were. The result was sort of a Chinese tattoo fail in reverse.
So yeah, you could get people copying manuscripts who had little or no education, as long as they had good artistic skills. My guess as to why they had women do it is that they're better at precision work, which is why they were employed as recently as a few decades ago to do things like string ferrite core memory, and a few decades before that to paint watch dials.